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Publishers Wanted Obsidian To Use Kickstarter

When it comes to Kickstarting video games, publishers want to have their cake and eat it, too.

Kickstarter is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it represents a possible sea change in the video game industry.

On the other hand, there are very few safeguards for backers, and accountability remains buried behind however opaque a wall each project wants to put up.

Now it appears that video game publishers are drumming up new and creative ways to use crowd-funding to benefit their own bottom line.

According to Obsidian Entertainment, the developer behind the Kickstarter smash success Project Eternity, publishers approached the developer prior to the Kickstarter asking them to do crowd-fund on their behalf.

“We were actually contacted by some publishers over the last few months that wanted to use us to do a Kickstarter,” Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart revealed in a Q&A on the Project Eternity Kickstarter page. “I said to them ‘So, you want us to do a Kickstarter for, using our name, we then get the Kickstarter money to make the game, you then publish the game, but we then don’t get to keep the brand we make and we only get a portion of the profits.’ They said, ‘Yes’.”

I suppose it’s no surprise. Publishers would be crazy not to pay attention to what’s going on with crowd-funding right now in the video game industry.

Then again, it’s pretty galling that they’d be so blatant about it, and it’s a shame (though again, no surprise) that Urquhart couldn’t name names.

It will be interesting to see the many creative ways Kickstarter, and crowd-funding more broadly, are exploited in the future.

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